Qui potest capere, capiat: this post is a bagatelle and footnote to various earlier posts, and I am on strike and will therefore not explain context. You will understand it if you have been in that conversation, or if you go through earlier posts to look for it.
Those ladies who resembled my Reeducator kept talking about how one must be powerless and give up “control.” At the same time, they want one to “draw boundaries.” The direct application to me is that I (according to them) should maintain limited friendships with people in whom I have no interest (by “drawing boundaries”) and exile people with whom I do maintain limited friendships — people of whom these ladies disapprove because they are not the people the ladies want me to maintain limited friendships with.
Ultimately — and this is my illumination –, they just want to tell me what to do, and they want me to be friends with people I will have to constantly manage. So they want to control me and to have me engaged in trying to control people. That is ironic since their rhetoric is about giving up power and control — although I think really it is a justification of being directionless and a desire to have others join them in this.
In the end, I think they just want conversation. None of these ladies, including my ex Reeducator who is a man, work at my level. They do not fathom the number of decisions I make, coldly and impartially, during the day. They do not realize that time spent dithering is time spent not moving ahead. I mean, seriously. You can’t work in a corporate environment, which is the academic environment, and not know with whom you want to deal, to what extent, and why, and whom you can afford to avoid if you so wish.
Honestly, I think this cant about “relinquishing control” but then also “drawing boundaries” is a way to get people to waste time. I could say the same about calling people who know what they want “impulsive.” I am about the most conservative, measured person you could meet on anything that matters, although I can “be spontaneous” and go to the beach with two hours’ notice. But calling people “impulsive” because they say (as I do) things like “no, I will not buy a pickup truck or a sedan, I will buy a hatchback, I already know what my needs are” is just a way of insisting that people DITHER and give you some of their time.
The imperative to DITHER is one of the main imperatives of Reeducation. You cannot have a full life because you must dither. You are required to hobble yourself by dithering. This is why Reeducation does not want one to leave bad situations behind. And the ladies, including my Reeducator, did not want me to leave other bad situations behind because they did not want me to leave them. At the same time, they wanted me to relinquish my essence, and they justified that by insisting that (all) “change is good.”
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
It seems like an addiction to servitude (femininity/co-dependency) whilst creating amusement for oneself by entertaining the notion of actually leaving the servitude. This reminds me of so much postmodernist flirting with leftism, but maintaining an overall conservative position.
Here is some key idea I am now working on:
One of the key differences between shamanism and traditional spiritualism seems to be that the shaman attempts to deceive “the spirits” — that is, the psycho-political forces in society at large — in order to control them, whereas the “medium” purports to merely channel them, more earnestly and sincerely.
So this is a key difference between Marechera’s approach and the traditional approach of Shona culture.
But actually I think that “flirting with freedom” is very common indeed. Maybe it really is one of the downsides of cultural studies, too, because one can flirt with a notion of freedom by mentally escaping into a book or a film, whilst not actually living a very creative life. I saw such a symptom in an undergraduate course plan that intimated that romance and romantic experiences were defined by not having anything to do with lived experience.
First paragraph — yes, very good points.
Second — very interesting. Very. Taussig related? (I haven’t read him in years, he is one of those I need to re understand.) But this description of Marechera’s shamanism is *very* intriguing.
It’s from the book that I am now reading, Shamanic Solitudes. A very good book on the psychology of shamanism, although it is based on a limited ethnographic study of the Nepalese shamans.
But the deception thing and the logic behind it — I already implicitly understood.
Flirting with freedom — yes, it’s easy. Sort of like having a hall pass. Only thinking about it.
I don’t think it’s really possible to have truly revolutionary ideas and not have them “impact” your life in some way. It doesn’t mean you have to dye your hair blue, BUT.
Yes, radical ideas always have some effect, but I would be inclined to stay away from those whose use of these ideas is so paltry that association with them would simply slow me down.
Here is what I’ve now written on Marechera:
A sixth point – however one that is already implied in all of the points mentioned above – is entailed in the notion of “shaman as trickster”. The shaman attempts to deceive “the spirits” — (that is in this case of Marechera, the psycho-political forces in society at large) — in order to control them, whereas the “medium” purports to merely channel them, so as to deliver their messages to the world of the living earnestly and sincerely.
Marechera’s forgetting of the date of his father’s death, or how old he was at that time and how it happened, can be read as an attempt to “deceive the spirits” as to the impact of this experience on him, by recreating the time and place out of his own mind.
So that the shaman is actor, not just acted upon, and is not just a (conservative) maintainer of order and guardian of tradition … not that I mean traditional ones always were that, but you get my drift.
Also, this is not Reeducated. In Reeducation that would be “denial” or repression or something, but in this shamanistic schema it is how M. has decided to work with the material. He’s working with it, as opposed to being wagged about by it as would happen were he merely “repressing the truth” or some such thing.
And here’s the book, although this review does not say a great deal.
http://www.nepalnews.com.np/contents/englishweekly/spotlight/2004/jul/jul16/review.htm
Right. He’s giving it a new nature. That is shamanic. Like I gave myself a new nature subsequent upon being attacked, and now conservatives who think they know the nature of a white, Rhodesian female, always misread me, for I do not have that nature anymore. But sometimes I forget that I once had a different nature, so I don’t always anticipate their mistakes. Also, I am unable to explain to them …. you know, shamanism … so I can’t give reason why I am so different from what they expect.
Instead I try more subtle approaches, trying to indicate that I am not what I seem to them to be.
For instance at the conference, some presenter there addressed me as follows:
“I have heard that you wrote a Paul ..(what was his name)…Williams edited memoir?”
And I thought, “Righty-ho, I vaguely remember that associate a male name with my efforts is supposed to subsume me under the male’s persona, according to the conservative paradigm.”
So I go: “Well actually, he helped me fill in some details about my upbringing that I couldn’t have known about at that age I was, living in Zimbabwe, but he could know about and more of a perspective on, since he was ten years older than I. But actually, there is a lot of stuff in that memoir that I have personally put there for my own reasons — Paul is not to be blamed for them.”
So, you can see, I try to correct the error indirectly, but it is always difficult.
I’m just not the person I am often taken to be.
Well I am going to have to get used to not being read right — don’t know why I want to be read right, since people of actual interest usually read pretty well right off without too much difficulty.
Two random thoughts: one, academics are NOT good at reading right. A non academic friend pointed out to me that academics tend to insist on remaining separate from their object of study and for that reason cannot understand it. So one of my friends, very strange case, on the one hand is trying hir hardest to *become* Hispanic culturally (is a Spanish professor) but on the other *always* has trouble understanding any cultural phenomenon that is right in front of hir (despite academic expertise in cultural studies).
Two, a friend from here has just moved to California on a job and understands it deeply already. You can discuss it with him as with a native, because he is not working with stereotypes but with the complexity of reality. He is of course smarter than most people and he has also taken an interest in figuring the place out, but still — it’s sort of a rare skill, to be able to see patterns and comment on them, without falling into overgeneralization (hm, he’s educated as a mathematician, maybe that’s what did it).
There’s an inherent timidity in a lot of academics, because they are genuinely afraid that the subject matter they are studying will overpower and overwhelm them. So they cut themselves off from it. I notice that in the past if I gave indication that I was not doing this, panic bells would ring on my behalf. But hopefully not anymore.
Apart from that, there was another dynamic (which I was describing in my earlier post), which is not based on people being academics as such, but based on people making natural, as it were, assumptions.
So I think the white ex-Zims there really read me as a conservative and embraced me quite warmly as such (even despite my paper and its contents) until I actually said something “odd” which made them recoil and depart from me. But only very subtly.
Funny.
of course the black Zimbabweans read me a little better, I guess, because they could see that there was a level of resistance to conformity in my speech.
but I don’t think that the white woman understood, at all, the irony in my retort.
I guess it is a real skill to recognize that one’s “natural” assumptions are assumptions and are not quite natural … they’re really only hypotheses in any given case. And people tend not to know how little information they actually have / how complex reality is.
WOW, afraid the subject matter will overwhelm them. I have a lot of academia related fears but not this one.
I think that people make the fairly reliable and not unfounded (empirically) assumption that people basically do not change. However, shamanism is about change. So that is why I see my transformation in that light. What prevents change? Generally the condemnation and warnings that issue from the superego, which can resound with terrifying force. But having faced death itself, the shaman is no longer afraid of mere superego and its shouts. So one can change. But it is very unusual to be able to tranform one’s character.
Interestingly, in Shamanic Solitudes there is discussion about a wood nymph who lives effectively on the other side of the mirror of everyday existence. Her feet point backwards, so that if you try to track her, you will be going in the wrong direction.
Shamanism is like that — when you try to track the character or identity of someone who has been shamanised. You will probably be going in precisely the wrong direction, if you take as your guide common or normal expectations.
I should read the book. All of this sounds much more familiar and normal than the stuff I started being told about how one had to be when I became a professor and started having to seriously deal with all of these people from the East.
(I have never understood fear of change or why people have it.)